Category Archives: Visitors

The IFLS is delighted to welcome Dr. Vicky Conway, Associate Professor of Law at Dublin City University to Osgoode for October & November 2018. She’ll be giving a public talk, FALLEN WOMEN OF EIRE – TRACING THE HISTORY OF THE CRIMINALISATION OF ABORTION IN IRELAND, on Thursday October 11 1230, Room TBC (rsvp please for catering).

Vicky has worked in a number of universities including Kent Law School and Queen’s University Belfast. She is a leading researcher on policing in Ireland with an emphasis on the intersection between social change, police culture and police accountability. She has published two monographs on policing in Ireland and was appointed by government to be a member of the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland which reported in September 2018. She is currently researching solicitor attendance at police station interviews and is one of the drivers of a training programme for solicitors who have begun to attend interviews. Vicky was a founding member of Lawyers for Choice and continues to be heavily active in working to ensure feminist reform of Irish abortion laws. She is also conducting research on the criminalisation of abortion in Ireland.

Vicky is visiting the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School in October and November 2018. Vicky would be delighted to meet with faculty, students and student societies to discuss any issues relating to reproductive rights, gender and the law, feminist legal activism, criminal procedure or policing while she is visiting at Osgoode. Reach her via the IFLS Director sonialaw@osgoode.yorku.ca

Sharon Cowan is coming as an Arthurs Visitor to Osgoode Hall Law School from Feb 8 to March 3. On Feb 13, she’ll give a talk (this was originally scheduled for Feb 16 but has been moved). All welcome but pls RSVP so we get the food order right.

Renu Mandhane hasn’t been the Chief Commissioner of the OHRC very long, but it’s been long enough to know she’s doing things very differently. Moving fast and publicly, she has moved the dial of public discourse on solitary confinement, racial profiling, and many other critical issues of the right to equality.

Join us on Friday Feb 1 for a conversation with Renu, covering the campaigns she’s spearheaded, and her views about the relationship between law, advocacy, activism and social change.

IFLS and Osgoode are delighted to welcome Prof. Sharon Cowan, Professor of Feminist and Queer Legal Studies at Edinburgh Law. She will be at Osgoode from Feb 8 to March 3. More about Sharon’s research at the bottom of this post or here.

On March 16 1230PM at Osgoode (more details & RSVP link to follow on this blog) Prof Cowan will give a talk entitled: Transgender challenges: identity, equality and community

In this paper I will present some findings from a project exploring trans people’s life experiences, and particularly their experiences of equality, across three jurisdictions: Scotland, Canada and the US. Trans people have struggled to gain legal rights and protections in each of these jurisdictions, notwithstanding long histories of civil rights and human rights. Equality has long been the focus of government and academic attention in each of these countries, but trans people themselves are rarely asked to reflect upon their everyday experiences of law, equality and discrimination. Differences between Canadian, US and Scottish interpretations and applications of human rights are well documented, and while all three have laws and policies that address equality, they each have very different legal cultures, histories and socio-political contexts. The project compares how trans people's experiences of equality vary and/or resonate across different social, political and legal cultures. In this paper I will explore how trans people’s lived experiences of gender identity and expression are intimately connected with other aspects of their daily lived experiences and identities, including poverty, race, cultural background, physical ability, kinship, nationality, geographical location, and immigration status. I will also examine questions of ethical representation in feminist research.

More about Professor Cowan:

Her research interests include: Gender, Sexuality and the Law; Feminist Legal Theory; Criminal Law; Criminal Justice; Asylum studies. Recent and current projects include a national empirical project, along with Helen Baillot of the Scottish Refugee Council, and Vanessa Munro of the University of Nottingham, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, looking at the the way in which women asylum claimaints whose applications are based on a claim of rape, are treated by the Asylum and Immigration Appeal Tribunal. Sharon is presently working on a comparative socio-legal project looking at the impact of law on transgender people. Along with Dr Chloe Kennedy (Edinburgh) and Professor Munro (Warwick), she is a co-editor of the new Scottish Feminist Judgments Project @ScottishFemJP.

We’re thrilled to welcome Sharon and will be posting more about her activities during her visit, and her work.

“Scholarship in the political economy tradition explores how unequal social relations are constructed in specific labour markets. The aim of this seminar is to bring this approach into conversation with the intersectionality literature, to examine the gendered and racialised ways in which inequalities in economic life and in the labour market are structured and experienced. This seminar will examine how women’s social location, for instance in terms of their migration status, race and ethnicity, family status and role in social reproduction, shapes their encounter with the labour market and impacts on the experience of equality law and other legislation as an agent for social change. This requires not only an investigation into intersections between identity categories such as gender and race, and the implications of intersectionality for equality and work. It also necessitates an exploration of other types of ‘intersection’, namely the interaction of employment and equality law with competing normative orders (trade law, human rights law, criminal law, and immigration law) which structure the vulnerability of those who enter a state and operate to deny women’s ability to realise the potentially transformative power of law.

Professor Ashiagbor’s research interests have focused on labour/employment law, particularly in the context of regional integration (the European Union and the African Union); trade and development; economic sociology of law; human rights, equality and multiculturalism. Her book The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance (OUP, 2005) won the 2006 Society of Legal Scholars/Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. She is currently working on ‘Social rights and the market: embedding trade liberalisation in regional labour law’, a research project that is interrogating the social dimension of regional economic integration with sub-Saharan Africa as its focus.